Joachim Savelsberg is a Visiting Scholar at the American Bar Foundation. He is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and (by courtesy) of Law at the University of Minnesota. He is a past holder of the Arsham and Charlotte Ohanessian Chair at the University of Minnesota, which is dedicated to issues of human rights and genocide. Savelsberg’s current research includes a project on NGO-prosecutorial networks in universal jurisdiction proceedings, work which was until recently funded by the National Science Foundation. He is also at work on a cohort study of experiences of German Jews during the 1910s and 1930s in Germany, based on the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Visual History Archives.
His most recent book, Knowing about Genocide: Armenian Suffering and Epistemic Struggles, was published in 2021 with the University of California Press. He is also the author of Representing Mass Violence (University of California Press, 2015) and coauthor, with Ryan D. King, of American Memories: Atrocities and the Law (Russell Sage Foundation, 2011). His earlier work concerns comparative imprisonment rates, the sociology of criminology, sentencing guidelines, Weberian sociology of law, and the criminalization of white-collar offences.
Savelsberg served, with Timothy Johnson, as Editor of Law & Society Review from 2014 to 2016. His research has been published in many journals and volumes, most recently American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Lexikon zur Soziologie, Zeitschrift für Genozidforschung, Memory Studies, and American Journal of Sociology. He is the winner of the 2021 Harry J. Kalven Prize, the 2022 Barrington Moore Book Award (for Knowing about Genocide), the 2017 William Chambliss Lifetime Achievement award, as well as many other awards, honors, and fellowships.